![]() worked with Schwarcz for a year on her Hebrew and “Judith gave her the tools that turned things around and also gave her confidence after years of having none in her studies.” “We really wanted our kids to have total command of both Hebrew and English, but we eventually had to focus just on the Hebrew because doing both was impossible,” says her mother. Her spoken Hebrew, like that of many native English-speakers with dyslexia, is fluent, however. has lived her whole life in Israel but her Hebrew is still weaker than her English, the language spoken in their home, because the dyslexia made it harder for her to read and write with fluency. “When I was a child in England there was still corporal punishment in the schools, so I was hit all the time and told I was lazy and stupid,” she recalls.ĭyslexia specialists interviewed for this article say that some immigrants and many immigrant children are only diagnosed with dyslexia after arriving in Israel because it isn’t until they have been faced with having to learn a new language and see they are failing to pick it up.ĭyslexia among immigrants is a double-shammy,”says A., an American in the center of the country whose 20-year-old daughter, K., has dyslexia, who asked for anonymity to keep her disability discrete. She immigrated to Israel 35 years ago from England and is dyslexic herself but went undiagnosed for years it wasn’t until her son Yaron was diagnosed in Israel in the early 1990s that she realized that she, too, likely had dyslexia as well. Schwarcz is one of a host of dyslexia specialists throughout the country with particular expertise in working with bilingual children, many of them from English-speaking homes. In many cases, the disorder is the root cause of social and behavioral problems in some children, because they lose self-confidence and have trouble integrating socially, says Judith Schwarcz, head of the Center for Learning Correction, which has offices in Ra’anana and Arad. But then I really began to worry about how I would survive in a country where I would probably never learn the language let alone master it.”ĭyslexia provides challenges to everyone with the diagnosis, but among immigrants who are confronted with having to learn a new language, dyslexia is an added burden that prevents them from learning at the same pace as their peers, experts say. I learned there was a real, valid reason behind my learning difficulties throughout my life. “ The diagnosis was a huge relief, actually, because I didn’t feel dumb anymore,” says C., who asked to remain anonymous because she is looking for a job and doesn’t want her struggles to be known among her friends. In the ulpanim, she says, “I didn’t have a clue what the teacher was talking about and I couldn’t grasp either the written or the spoken language.” She finally got herself evaluated in 2009, and was diagnosed with dyslexia, a reading impairment that often accompanies difficulty writing unrelated to one’s IQ. She always had menial secretarial jobs and could never aspire to more than that because she didn’t expect more out of herself. ![]() She began to consider that she might have a learning disability after all, she struggled in school for years in England and never knew why. moved to Israel from England in 2006, the thirty-something immigrant took three ulpanim, or intensive Hebrew language courses, but just couldn’t grasp even the most basic Hebrew words. Unmasking Dyslexia on the Bumpy Road to Bilingualism For English-speaking immigrants, the disorder makes learning to read and write Hebrew an added challenge By Tamar Morad, Friday, December 17, 2010, Anglo FileĪfter C.
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